A leading children’s publisher has said he will not bow to pressure to stop labelling books for either girls or boys – because it is a “fact of life” that people search for gifts according to gender.

It’s easy to pound on this guy, but it does raise the question of who exactly is responsible for changing patterns like this? Is it the retailers? The publishers? The buyers? So hard to know.

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“See here, I want you to come to Random House and lose some money for us with literary books,” the press’s president and publisher, Harold Evans, told Daniel Menaker, then fiction editor ofThe New Yorker, in 1995. “You have five years to fook oop.”